


Kusokora

by AlexSeanchai



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adrien Agreste Is Sunshine, Autistic Kagami Tsurugi, Crafts, Designer Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Fluff, Gen, Kagami Tsurugi just wants friends, Kagami Tsurugi needs to live a little (and knows it), ML Secret Santa 2019, Marinette Dupain-Cheng Is a Mess, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22010398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexSeanchai/pseuds/AlexSeanchai
Summary: "Wanna ditch?" Marinette asks when Kagami reaches her, an excited half-whisper as she sneaks glances out into the courtyard where a few other early arrivals are stretching or walking around. "If anyone asks, you were here the whole time. Adrien will back you up. Unless M. D'Argencourt asks, in which case you twisted your ankle and couldn't come today." Marinette smirks. "Adrien will back you up."Ah, it's a conspiracy. Kagami smiles. "Where are we going?"(In which crafts are a good way to spend quality time together, and also both girls know theothercould do with being less of a perfectionist.)
Relationships: Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug & Kagami Tsurugi
Comments: 21
Kudos: 304





	Kusokora

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TsukiyoSaiai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TsukiyoSaiai/gifts).



Kagami, early, walks into Collège Françoise Dupont and toward the locker room, mind more on what tricks Adrien might have planned for today's sparring matches than on anything else he could be planning. Adrien did say last week to watch for Marinette this week, but M. D'Argencourt doesn't permit spectators, so whatever it is will be after—

A flash of pink. Kagami glances: Marinette is waving to her. Beckoning her toward the classroom Marinette's peeking out of.

"Wanna ditch?" Marinette asks when Kagami reaches her, an excited half-whisper as she sneaks glances out into the courtyard where a few other early arrivals are stretching or walking around. "If anyone asks, you were here the whole time. Adrien will back you up. Unless M. D'Argencourt asks, in which case you twisted your ankle and couldn't come today." Marinette smirks. "Adrien will back you up."

Ah, it's a conspiracy. Kagami smiles. "Where are we going?"

* * *

"Creative reuse store," Kagami repeats, then focuses on the window displays. Someone's built a miniature apartment: kitchen; bedroom; living room repurposed as art studio, complete with a painting in progress of the Parisian skyline, tiny reference photos of Ladybug and Chat Noir in action clothespinned to the canvas.

"Yeah, you can find some of the coolest things in here," Marinette says. "And then people can do art with those things instead of just piling the landfills higher! It's lower stress than a regular artist supply store," she continues, tapping fingertips nervously together. "Since most things in here are already used. So it doesn't feel so much like I have to get whatever I'm doing right the first time."

Kagami winces.

"I thought you'd know that feeling," Marinette says, softer. "It's just for fun, okay? It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't even have to be _good_ —" She stops short, gaze catching on the miniature apartment. "Actually, maybe it _should_ be bad. Maybe whatever we make from whatever we get today, we're trying to make it as bad as it can be."

That— "So if someone were to say how bad it _is_ ," Kagami says slowly, "that would be not an insult but assurance that we were successful."

Marinette beams.

"Lead the way," says Kagami.

* * *

There are too many artistic media.

Kagami voices this opinion while petting a skein of royal blue yarn that says it's two hundred meters of merino wool. The shelves of fabric include something bright red and velvety, something marigold with chevrons woven in somehow, and something midnight black with metallic coppery threads woven in, and Kagami sort of wants to roll around in all of it. She's seen enough Western-style dragon stories to wonder if something is going on she ought to talk to Longg-sama or Ladybug about, but then, she remembers getting scolded for wrapping herself up in one of her mother's silk kimonos when she herself wasn't yet taller than her mother's hip.

Marinette snorts. "My life," she says, "let me show you it. —Oooh, velvet!" She snatches up the bright red fabric and buries her face in it.

"What are you planning to do with that?" Kagami asks, watching Marinette wiggle in delight.

"—Uh, nothing," Marinette says unconvincingly. Kagami eyes her; Marinette winces. "Not this time," she says, putting the velvet back. "I think I need to do something in a medium I haven't ever used before."

This makes sense. Kagami scoops up the velvet instead, and the marigold chevrons and the black with copper. "I have never attempted to sew anything," she says to Marinette's wide-eyed stare. "Or…whatever one does with yarn." She adds the blue wool to her basket.

"Knit, crochet, weave, macramé…" Marinette grins at her. "All sorts of things. Don't worry," she adds, noticing Kagami considering the many different kinds of knitting needle, "I have tools."

* * *

Getting Kagami and their purchases into Marinette's apartment involves a little more sneaking and giggling than it maybe really needed. Given Marinette brings them in through the door that goes directly up to the apartment instead of through the bakery, then opens the door to the bakery a crack to tell her parents she's home. It isn't a trick that would ever work on her mother.

Marinette runs right back downstairs once she's dropped her purchases on her bedroom floor, leaving Kagami to glance curiously around: it looks like the room started life as an attic; Marinette loves pink, black, and white above all other colors; there's a collage of photos on the wall. Marinette's friends, Kagami thinks, noting how often Adrien appears, and Nino and Alya (often together, and more Alya than Nino), and Kitty Section and fans: the pink and purple punk lesbians, the rainbow-haired girl with the fiery voice and the black-and-crossbones gentle giant, the soft-spoken teal guitarist—

—and some photos from Instagram. Some are Alya's Ladyblog photos—Ladybug and Chat Noir on a picnic; Alya taking a selfie with Rena Rouge; Chat Noir and Carapace, one clearly less camera-shy than the other—and others are from Marinette's own feed or (as with Marinette herself wearing a black-cat-ears headband, or Chloé and her red-haired friend with several others in the background) those of people Marinette knows.

Kagami recognizes the photo Marinette took a few days after her own birthday, though it's presented without context. The one Adrien took of Kagami fistbumping Nino is a screenshot including Adrien's caption _She's getting the hang of it!_. One Adrien took of Kagami after a fencing practice was printed off by itself, with screenshots of comments from Adrien and Chloé tacked beside it, and a surprised Pikachu sketched with the comments.

Marinette reappears with a roll of waxed paper, another of paper towels, and a plate of croissants, macarons, and éclairs. "Sewing supplies here and here, fabric scraps there and over there," she says, pointing to various shelves and drawers. "Let me know if you need anything."

—The fabric scraps are an absolute _treasure trove_.

"What if I wanted to do—" Kagami stops. The word is not 'kora', and even less is it 'kusokora', deliberately bad art or not. "Sticking bits of these together on something. To hang on the wall, maybe."

"Like a collage?" Marinette asks, and Kagami resolutely does not facepalm. "Sure, let me find you something to stick them _to_ , and some glue—"

Marinette turns up a battered brown clipboard and pries the clip itself off, then goes to a different part of the floor to unroll some wax paper and start frowning at her different colors of modeling clay. Kagami sets to figuring out how to arrange fabric scraps on the board, and what shapes to cut from her purchases. She doesn't want any of the brown to show through, though, and having the fabric edges poking up would be fun to touch but not very _visually_ pretty…

And Kagami cannot, she discovers, cut fabric in a straight line. Or with a deliberate curve that is also the curve she _intends_ to cut. At all. Staring down at her eight attempts to get the red velvet the right shape to fit inside the curve of the pale yellow T-shirt scrap, Kagami wants to cry.

Or at least to think resentful thoughts about Marinette. Four headless human shapes lie on the wax paper—two bright red, one black, and one bright green, along with a green disc—and Marinette has smushed some red and some yellow together to make a bright orange (Kagami can see the streaks where the colors didn't blend quite right) and is working on another figure, muttering to herself the whole while.

"— _Ugh_ ," Marinette says abruptly, smashing the half-formed orange figure between her palms. "Ugh! Why won't—why won't it—"

"…Marinette?"

She takes a breath, clearly calming herself—and suddenly it becomes apparent why Kagami has been akumatized multiple times and Marinette never—and turns to Kagami. "Need help?"

Yes? No? "I thought you said you were picking a medium you'd never worked in before so you _wouldn't_ feel like you had to do it right."

"I did say that," Marinette tells her handful of orange-streaked modeling clay. "I did say that, didn't I." She smiles at Kagami. "How are you doing with this?"

Kagami winces. "I don't want any brown to show through, but I can't get the pieces the right shape."

Marinette considers the heaps of fabric. "Maybe if you put the black and copper over the whole board first? Or the yellow? You have enough of either. Then you don't have to worry about how closely the shapes fit or how much thicker it'll be where pieces overlap, and nobody has to say a word about seam allowances." She reaches for the black and copper fabric, then stops. "And I'm going to wash my hands before I try to play with it."

Cutting a rectangle of the black and copper that's enough bigger than the ex-clipboard that Kagami can fold the fabric over all four edges is a really good idea, actually. She picks up the scissors. "What are you trying for?"

"Superhero figurines," Marinette says from her vanity. "It shouldn't be hard to make Ladybug's spots look right, and maybe not Carapace's turtle shell details, but I'm not sure about Ryūko's stripe or Chat Noir's, uh, whole aesthetic. And Rena Rouge kind of has two main colors, not one with a detail color or two like everyone else." She dries her hands on a towel. "And one of the two main colors doesn't even come premixed!"

Kagami sets down the fabric rectangle and steals a lump of white modeling clay and a bit of the orange. It doesn't mix together at _all_ right, but at least when she starts flattening pieces of yellow, it doesn't look like she's sticking them to a porcelain ball. Two black triangles, a thin black rectangle, two green circles, and press her fingernail in the right spot—

"Look," Kagami says, showing Marinette her masterpiece of inept craftsmanship and flawed fine motor control, "it's Chat Noir!"

"Wow, that's _horrible_ ," Marinette exclaims, snapping a photo, and dissolves in giggles.

* * *

Kagami's phone vibrates, interrupting her chemistry homework. Marinette's texted a screenshot of her Instagram post from hours earlier, of Kagami's clay Chat Noir, except she sensibly didn't say it's Kagami's. More to the point, Adrien has left two replies:

> **adrienagrestebrand:** SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY
> 
> **adrienagrestebrand:** I'm serious, you two, that is limited edition collectible art and I want it

Kagami grabs a clean skirt to press to her mouth so her mother won't hear her laughter.

**Author's Note:**

> [kusokora](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BD%E3%82%B3%E3%83%A9)
> 
> [SCRAP Creative Reuse](https://scrapcreativereuse.org/) doesn't have locations outside the United States, but, you know, pretend there's one in Paris.
> 
> Find me on [Dreamwidth](https://alexseanchai.dreamwidth.org/) and [Tumblr](https://alexseanchai.tumblr.com/).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Kusokora](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28441188) by [lysandyra (pxssnelke)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pxssnelke/pseuds/lysandyra)




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